Merger Puts the Squeeze on Family
It’s a plain house on an ordinary street near LAX, but Paul and Michele Carll never wished for anything grand. Just a modest home in which to raise back-to-back blessings--one set of 4-year-old triplets, and one set of 4-week-old twins.
This is a morning of soft white Westside light, the sun and sea working it out just right, and inside the house Paul is holding one slumbering twin and Michele the other as they talk about how it went wrong. How, after a long haul up the hill, they are in free-fall, plunging through the floor of the middle class.
“We did not live high on the hog,” says Michele, 33, who had been an account manager for a talent agency but put her career on hold with the triplets. “We put money aside for the future, for the kids, and for this house. The house is our nest egg, and it could be gone in a matter of months.”
This story is not just about the Carlls, but about a time in which ordinary people wonder what is left to trust. A time in which it’s uncomfortably easy to see ourselves sitting next to the Carlls.
Paul says he was assured that his job as a computer systems manager at Teleflora, an international flower delivery company, was secure despite some restructuring.
“I said, ‘You know I have triplets, with twins on the way. I have a mortgage, a car payment.’ They constantly reassured me.”
Then comes Sept. 11, the end of all guarantees, and here are Paul and Michele wondering about the world they’re bringing their children into. The very next day, Paul, 37, gets called in by the human resources boss and finds out he’s got problems he hadn’t imagined.
“I lost my job,” he told Michele by phone.
The severance deal was a few months’ pay and about two weeks of medical coverage. Carll had only been there 15 months, Teleflora having flattered him away from a medical publishing company.
“I have a lot of empathy for Paul and his situation,” says Mike Weinman, Teleflora’s chief operating officer. “One of the most difficult things you do as a manager is terminate an employee.”
Weinman says Paul did his job just fine, but Teleflora merged with another company and he became redundant. He says no one gave him any guarantees, but Paul insists it was Weinman himself who told him he was safe.
“I was devastated,” says Paul, who immediately began working the Internet, trolling for work, as Michele began pleading with Teleflora to have a heart and extend their medical coverage.
“After I called numerous times, begging and in tears, they finally relented,” she says, and agreed to cover the Carlls through the birth of the twins.
It was a life saver. Michele became anemic, delivered early, and lost so much blood she needed two transfusions. She’s still recovering, but the insurance runs out on Friday, and either the Carlls come up with $700 a month or they go without.
Paul, meanwhile, has sent out more than 10,000 resumes, most of them by e-mail, but it has been like pointing a flashlight into the night sky. The tech field is so flooded by the dot.com crash, he’s up against bigger resumes for a smattering of jobs that pay half of what he made. He’s looked beyond tech, but no luck there, either. And the free-fall continues.
They switched the triplets from private school to public.
They let the housekeeper go.
They maxed out the credit cards.
They use government coupons at Ralphs.
They’re selling one of the two cars.
They’re two mortgage payments away from flat broke.
Triplets and twins, and no job, Paul says with a chortle he calls the laughter of the insane. He’s considered delivering pizza or knocking on the door at Target, but they’d lose the house, so he’s trying to hold out for something more substantial. They bought this place only 18 months ago, having rented it first while squirreling away the down payment.
They sit in the family room now, which they had just expanded to make room for five little ones, cradling twins no bigger than loaves of bread. Photos of the triplets are everywhere, filling the room with bright-eyed innocence.
“It’s not a case of woe is me,” says Paul, who sits in a rocking chair with Colin held against him. “You can drive within a one-mile radius of here and find a lot of families far more destitute than we are. And for every negative in this, there are 10 positives. Everyone’s healthy, and I’m able to be home and help my wife and my kids.”
“We have each other,” says Michele, who holds Ava-Grace and plans to look for a job once she recovers from the complications of delivery. “And we’re best friends. All we want is a 9-to-5 job with company picnics. We just want normal.”
But does normal still exist, they wonder, or is it only a quaint reverie? They see Enron or Global Crossing execs walk away with sacks of money while the dreams of their duped middle-class employees and investors go up in smoke. They hear a transformer blow out on the street and worry that LAX is under attack.
There are no promises now, Paul says. “But you know what you can believe in?” he says, speaking over the murmur of his own doubts and fears. “Your family, your faith, and your abilities. I’ll find something and work my way back up. We’re not looking for any handouts.”
Michele’s eyes fill. When Paul takes a break from diapers and shuttling the triplets around town, she sometimes finds him staring at nothing, and her heart aches. Often, in the middle of the night, she finds him draped in a blue glow, scanning the World Wide Web for a turn of fortune.
Once, when he was unaware, Michele wrote a long e-mail to this newspaper. Father of the year, she called him. Husband of the year, too. Maybe some company will read about “this extraordinary man and his talents,” she wrote. Maybe someone will give him a chance.
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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.
